by Jonah Hewitt
“WHO gave this to you?!” he demanded of Nephys.
“What?” Nephys was too frightened by the Necromancer’s intensity to think, let alone answer the question.
“WHO?!!” he yelled grabbing Nephys’ robe with his free hand and dragging him closer while he shook the closed fist with the stone in it near Nephys’ face, “The stone should never have left the safety of the underworld! WHO GAVE IT TO YOU?!”
Nephys blanched and couldn’t speak.
“ANSWER ME!”
“T-the Chamberlain!” Nephys finally sputtered, pulling away from Moríro’s grip. The Necromancer went white and he let go of Nephys’ robes. Nephys fell back to the ground and trembled in fear.
“Who?” the Necromancer asked faintly, but his eyes were unfocused and dazed.
“T-the Chamberlain, the Chamberlain of Death himself and high priest to all his mysteries! He gave me the stone. He told me I had to give it to you and that you would know what to do with it. It’s the truth, Necromancer, I swear!”
“The Chamberlain?!” The Necromancer swayed on his feet as if he were about to fall down, but his eyes suddenly cleared, his stance became solid as granite, his glance fiery and resolute. He quickly withdrew the hand with the stone and squirreled it into an interior pocket of his coat. He grabbed Nephys by the arm and set him on his feet.
“You!” he bellowed, pointing to Tim who jumped when he spoke, “Will that vehicle of yours still run?”
“Um…I think so,” Tim replied uncertainly.
Moríro was already turning back to the house before Tim had finished answering. “Everyone MUST be ready to go in fifteen minutes!” Moríro stormed up the porch steps, sending Hiero into a hooting frenzy and slammed the red door to the house behind him so hard the bell hummed from the vibration.
They all stared at each other in confusion for a moment before settling in to wait. Nephys turned to look at Lucy. She did look a lot like her mother, only with lighter hair, skin and eyes. She looked as dejected and alone as Maggie had when he had first come across her in the swamp. Nephys reached into his robes and closed his hand over the tiny scroll. He had one last errand to perform, but he didn’t have the slightest idea how to approach her in her current state.
Just then, as if by fate, Lucy struggled back to her feet and walked over to where the boys were standing. She pulled her hair behind her ears and fidgeted as if she was trying to think of something to say but didn’t know what. Finally, she just turned and said, “Thank you,” to Sky and Miles. “Thank you for… saving me back there.” And then added as if it wasn’t obvious, “Y’know…from the zombies.”
Miles looked down and shrugged and looked at Sky. Sky smiled a smug little smile and looked like he was going to say something cute when Lucy cut him off.
“Don’t think for a moment that this means I’ve forgotten about earlier!” she said angrily. Schuyler just closed his mouth around the lollipop and smiled some more. She took a few steps past them and looked like she was going to walk away when she stepped back to take a second look at Tim. She looked him up and down and finally said quietly to him, “Why are you wearing Sky’s shirt?”
Tim hemmed and hawed for a minute before fessing up, “Um, it always was my shirt. Sky was just borrowing it, y’know, because he didn’t think he could approach you in the gift shop without, y’know, a shirt on.” Tim put his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth anxiously, slightly embarrassed.
Lucy looked at Tim wide-eyed, then back to Sky and his naked chest. Schuyler waggled his eyebrows at her. She didn’t say anything but just sighed. She gave Nephys a look before she spoke again.
“And what’s your story?” she said a little bit surly, “I suppose you’re some awful dead thing too. What are you, a zombie, a ghoul, another one of them?” She shot a vicious look at Tim, Miles and Sky.
“Hey, do I have to keep reminding you people that I’m still alive?” Tim said, a bit hurt.
“Shut up, bloodbag,” Sky said dismissively. Tim opened his mouth to protest but said nothing. Lucy looked back to Nephys and widened her eyes as if to say “Well?” and he realized he hadn’t answered her question yet.
“Um…no…I’m a child of Limbo,” he said a bit defensively. She just raised her eyebrows at him. That obviously meant nothing to her.
“Um...we’re the lost children of the underworld. We…we help around the afterlife and live in perpetual service to the Great Master, help him catalogue the dead, record things, stuff like that. I’m a scribe, personally.”
“Great Master?” she said curious but cautious, “You mean Death?”
“Um…yeah,” Nephys said cringing.
She took in a big sigh, “Great. Why not?” she shrugged. “That’s. Just. Perfect.” She looked completely numb and stared into space. She turned away and walked off to the end of the garden and stood near the stone lantern, holding herself with her back to everyone.
“I think that’s your cue, baldy,” Sky said a half a minute later, “If you are ever gonna deliver that note you’re not going to find a better time.” Nephys looked at Lucy’s back and then at Sky’s face and the faces of the others.
“Go on now.” Miles tossed his head in Lucy’s direction. Nephys looked back to Lucy, tightened his hand around the scroll and walked after her. He stopped a few feet behind her. She had her eyes closed with her chin up and was breathing very slowly as if she was listening intently to something. Nephys was about to say something when she spoke.
“You have a heartbeat,” she said a little perplexed, “I didn’t think dead things could have heartbeats.” She looked down and opened her eyes. “Or maybe that’s only vampires. I’m… so new at all this.” She closed her eyes and looked up again. “I can hear them y’know. Heartbeats. Tim’s, Moríro’s and yours. Yours is different though. Not a steady beat at all, more of a hum.” She looked at him curiously but then looked back to the empty woods where the boy and the specter of the witch had last disappeared. “Miles and Sky don’t have heartbeats. Just shadows spinning like gurgling drains to nowhere.” She shuddered a little. Then she took another step forward as if she wanted to be further away from the sound of gurgling shadows. After another profound, awkward silence, Nephys wiped his palms on his robes and got the courage to speak. He needed to tell Lucy about her mother, but he couldn’t just blurt it out. He decided to keep it simple.
“My name’s Nephys,” he said. She didn’t look at him. Nephys sighed. “You can call me Neppy, though. Everyone does…even your…” He stopped. “Well everyone calls me Neppy.”
She didn’t look at him but just stared off into space. Then after a while she wiped her eyes a bit. “I’m sorry. I’m being rude. My mom said everyone’s got problems and so there’s no reason to expect someone else to put up with yours.” She turned to look at him. “Hello, Neppy, I’m Lucy Miller,” she said formally.
She held out her hand stiffly. At first he thought she wanted him to put something in it, but the way she was holding it, stiff and vertically, that didn’t make sense. Then he remembered something.
“Oh…I’m supposed to shake it, right?”
Lucy laughed, “Well…yes.”
He reached up and grabbed her right hand with his own right hand. It was awkward, but Lucy helped him through it raising and lowering her hand in a slow rhythmic fashion until he got the hang of it.
“I’m sorry, I’m not really used to your customs. I haven’t been on earth since I died more than…well I haven’t been to earth in a really long time.”
She just smiled. He liked holding her hand. It was warm and gentle. It was like holding the stone. Her eyes were as vibrant green as the stone and he could see her mother in her.
Finally, she looked at him a little funny and then said, “You’re supposed to let go of it after a while.”
“Oh.” He dropped her hand nervously, even though he didn’t want to.
She pulled her hair behind her ears and said, “Thanks, y’know for pulling, that th
ing off of me earlier.” She shot a venomous look towards Hiero, who was venturing a little from the safety of the stairs. The second the imp caught her eye, though, it darted back for cover with a whining, “flubbit.”
Nephys smiled. “My fault really,” Nephys said a little dejectedly, “If it wasn’t for me it wouldn’t have even been here.” Nephys looked up at her expectantly. “Sorry.”
She huffed a little and looked a little angry. She went to put her hands in her back pockets, just like her mother did when she wanted to assume a commanding position, but neither the robe nor the pajama bottoms had any back pockets so she had to settle with folding her arms across her chest instead.
“Well,” she said after a moment, “I forgive you and thanks…anyway.”
She pointed back to the stairs where Hiero was still hiding. “What is that thing anyway? I can sense you and even the bloodsuckers over there,” by which she meant Miles and Sky, “But I get nothing from it. It’s like it’s not there at all. What is it? Some sort of Frankenstein’s monster stitched together from a duck and a pig and some left over plumbing supplies?” She wrinkled her nose at it in disgust.
As she said this, the little imp ducked even further under the stairs as if it was afraid of her. Nephys laughed a little. She really was Maggie’s daughter.
“Hiero?” Nephys said, a little surprised, “Oh, he’s not a dead thing. You have to be living at some point to die, and he was never really alive, not in the proper sense.”
“Then what is he?” Lucy asked.
“He’s an imp.”
She looked at him skeptically. “An imp?”
“Um…yes…An imp is a soulless gestalt, a psychic manifestation of the collective fears…” Nephys began, but from Lucy’s raised eyebrows he could tell he was offering too much detail. “Um…it’s a bagpipe.” He finished hastily.
“A bagpipe?” she said, incredulous.
“Um…yeah…whatever you fear or hate the most in this life, those fears come to life and become imps who torment your soul in the life to come.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“So if I’m terrified of Twinkies, a giant monster Twinkie is just going to pop out of nowhere and chase me around the afterlife for all eternity?” Lucy chuckled a little.
Nephys didn’t know what a Twinkie was, but he decided he didn’t need to. “Yeah, pretty much.”
Lucy snorted and shook her head. She regarded the bagpipe as if it were an affront to all nature and decency, which, Nephys had to remind himself, it probably was.
“So that thing was created by someone who really hated bagpipes?” Lucy continued.
“Either that or someone who really loved bagpipes.”
“Someone who loved bagpipes?! How is a bagpipe a torture to someone who loved bagpipes?” Lucy asked, disbelieving.
Just then Hiero let out a long series of the most discordant and abominable notes Nephys had ever heard him give, as if affronted that someone could doubt his ability to torment souls. “HOOOONparNAFFFA-spppfttt-BLAAAAARNT!!!”
Each note whistled or sputtered like a demonic firework and split the eardrum like an ice pick on the end of a jackhammer. Everyone turned and clamped their hands over their ears, even the vampires.
“Oh. That’s how,” Lucy said simply, unscrewing her face and unclenching her hands from the sides of her head. “Well, that thing better stay out of my mother’s garden, or I swear....” She folded her arms across her chest again. Nephys had to hide a smile. She looked so much like her mother when she did that. Her hair was lighter, her face rounder, her eyes bright green instead of brown, but she had all the same mannerisms and stubbornness.
“Why was it after me and Yo-yo anyway?” she asked suddenly.
“Hmm?” Nephys realized he was looking at her rather than listening.
“Yo-yo. The boy that that witch ran off with. What did the thing want with him and me?”
“Oh.” Nephys thought for a moment of how to say this sensitively. “It’s kind of like a vampire, but instead of blood, it feeds off of human misery, pain, anger, frustration, that sort of thing.”
Lucy’s expression didn’t even change, she just sighed again. This answer didn’t seem to surprise her at all.
“That’s why it’s best not to encourage it by being angry or miserable,” Nephys added helpfully.
“I see,” she said quietly.
“The best thing to do is to not let it boss you around. Your mother is really good at that. She’s the only one I’ve ever known that the thing will take orders from, frankly.”
Nephys went rigid. He hadn’t meant to just blurt it out like that. It had just happened.
“What did you say?” Lucy’s voice was soft and hoarse like a whisper from a tomb.
He turned to look at her. Her face was deathly white and her eyes hung in her sockets as if they were about to fall out. He froze, not knowing what to say next.
“What did you say?” came her desperate voice again.
There was no avoiding it now, no gentle way to take it back. He just had to press forward.
“I…I know your mother. We…we met in the underworld,” Nephys stammered nervously.
Lucy eyes were locked tight in an expression of shock, but already they were beginning to fill with tears.
“She…she found out I was going back.”
Lucy pulled her hair back from her forehead and her eyes finally managed to break the locked expression and darted about frantically while her lower lip trembled.
“She wanted to let you know that she was alright.”
“But…but…” Lucy put her hands to her mouth as if to force down the large, gulping sobs. Her whole body began convulsing. She was hyperventilating and bent over to keep herself from passing out. Nephys thought she was going to fall down.
He reached out, grabbed her arm and held her up. “It’s all right, she’s okay!” he tried to sound reassuring. “She was lost in the marsh of lost souls….” Lucy looked directly at him with those large, green eyes in a state of panic and he instantly knew he had said the wrong thing. “But it’s ok!” he immediately said, trying to correct his mistake. “She’s okay because we found her, Hiero and me.” Nephys nodded in Hiero’s direction and Lucy’s eyes followed to where the imp was cowering under the porch stairs. Even now he was peeking out, looking at her in an almost sympathetic glare, or as close to one as the vile little imp could muster. She was breathing heavily and shaking her head in disbelief as if boggled by the idea that the pig-duck thing could ever have anything to do with her mother.
“That…thing…saved…my…mother?” She was desperately trying to calm down while talking between sobs.
“Um…yes,” he said noncommittally. Nephys decided to leave off the part about the car coming to life and the twenty minutes of screaming, let alone Hiero’s motivations which had more to do with boredom than altruism. The important thing was that she knew her mother was okay. “She’s okay, and she wanted you to know she’s okay,” Nephys managed to get out. Lucy kept sobbing, but she placed her hand on her chest and forced herself to take in deep, slow breaths. Finally somehow, Lucy got control of herself, stood upright and calmed down to the point where she was not openly sobbing, though she was still tearing up pretty badly.
“She’s in the underworld?” she said, sounding disappointed. Everyone sounded like that.
Nephys nodded yes.
“But…she’s…she’s okay?” she said hesitantly, but somewhat hopefully.
Nephys let go of her arm, reached into his robes and pulled out the tiny scroll of papyrus. Lucy looked at in amazement, clutching her hands near her chest.
“It’s…It’s not really allowed, but…she sent you a note. She wanted you to have this.” Nephys held out his hand with the note held loosely between his fingers. She looked at it frantically and Nephys thought she was going to start sobbing again for a moment, but she remained composed. She reached out gingerly for the note before she withdre
w her hand when it was less than halfway there. She clutched her hand back to her chest, looked around nervously and danced on her toes for a minute uncertainly. Then calming herself, she reached forward again, this time more slowly and carefully pulled the note from Nephys’ hand. Her warm fingers, wet from wiping her tears, grazed his as she pulled it free. Once it was out of his hand, she quickly pressed it to her bosom and held it there, as if afraid it would disappear if she didn’t hold it tight enough.
She turned to look away before quickly turning back.
“Thank you,” she said simply. Then she turned and walked a few steps further on, looking back over her shoulder once or twice as she went. He could see as she walked away that she unrolled the tiny scroll, holding the note close to her face to see it in the dark, her eyes darting back and forth at a furious pace to read her mother’s last words to her from beyond the grave.
Nephys thought it best to go. It was a very private moment after all. He turned and walked back to the truck. As he walked, he thought about all the dead souls that would desperately want to say something to their loved ones left behind and what they would say if they could send just one message back. He thought about all the unspoken “I love you’s,” all the harsh words they would take back, all the unspoken advice or counsel, and it made him happy to think that at least one person, one mother, got to say something to the living after all, and that one lonely and grief-stricken girl got to hear her mother’s last words. Nephys smiled and thought of the peace and resolution this one small act of his would bring, but before he could feel too satisfied with himself, or even walk a third step, Lucy’s hand clamped down tight on his shoulder like a vice and spun him back around.
“What does this mean?!” she said in a tense, hoarse whisper. She was shaking the note in his face. She didn’t look calm or happy or even sad. She looked angry and upset. Whatever impact Nephys thought Maggie’s note would have on her daughter it wasn’t this!
